This theory proposes that, as far as instruction is concerned, the instructor should try and encourage students to discover principles by themselves. Put simply, students construct knowledge from their own experiences.
The instructor and student should engage in an active dialog (i.e., socratic learning). The task of the instructor is to translate information to be learned into a format appropriate to the learner’s current state of understanding.
Curriculum should be organized in a spiral manner so that the student continually builds upon what they have already learned.
- It emphasises big concepts
- It uses sources other than textbooks
- learning is interactive and there is exchange between students and teacher
- learner-centered
- students are active learners
- emphasis is more on the basic skills
- textbooks are the main resource
- learning is rote memorization and repetition
- teacher-centered
- students are passive learners
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Principle 1 - Readiness
Instruction must be concerned with the experiences and contexts that make the student willing and able to learn.
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Principle 2 - Spiral Organization
Instruction must be structured so that it can be easily grasped by the student.
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Principle 3 - Going Further
Instruction should be designed to facilitate extrapolation and or fill in the gaps (going beyond the information given)
A practical example - prime numbers
“The concept of prime numbers appears to be more readily grasped when the child, through construction, discovers that certain handfuls of beans cannot be laid out in completed rows and columns. Such quantities have either to be laid out in a single file or in an incomplete row-column design in which there is always one extra or one too few to fill the pattern. These patterns, the child learns, happen to be called prime. It is easy for the child to go from this step to the recognition that a multiple table , so called, is a record sheet of quantities in completed mutiple rows and columns. Here is factoring, multiplication and primes in a construction that can be visualized.”